Go to Bed a Little Wiser: Why Reading Is an Artist's Unfair Advantage

There's a version of the "starving artist" myth that says talent is the whole game — you either have the eye, the hand, the voice, the gift or you don't. Charlie Munger, who spent his life studying success across wildly different fields, would have rejected that outright. His refrain wasn't "be brilliant." It was smaller and more repeatable than that: go to bed a little wiser than you woke up.

I am often asked: What inspires you? To be honest, The rent, the monthly bills, my future. In other words, "Get to work on my passion."

For a painter, a sculptor, a novelist, that's not a cute aphorism — it's a studio practice. The artists whose work keeps deepening decade after decade aren't the ones who found their style at twenty-five and defended it. They're the ones who never stopped being curious past their own medium. They read history, architecture, botany, physics, other people's failed drafts. They treat their own ignorance as a to-do list instead of an embarrassment. This has helped me develop different styles over the years in my own art. It takes years for anyone to develop a style or styles and sometimes longer for people to recognize it. It's an evolution that compounds. An overnight success in the arts quite often takes twenty years. Just saying…

I think about this every time I open my own gallery to the public. The collectors who come back aren't buying a static thing — they're watching a body of work evolve, and they can tell within minutes whether an artist has stopped learning. Stagnant work has a smell to it. So does work made by someone who's still hungry.

The practical version of this for a creative career: build a reading habit that has nothing to do with your craft's how-to books. Read outside your lane on purpose. I love reading and learning, especially anything that is not going to teach me how to paint the same brown and yellow painting that everyone has seen in the how-to magazine for the last forty years. Come on guys! Branch out a little. A painter who reads about jazz improvisation learns something about composition that no painting manual will teach. A novelist who studies geology learns about deep time and pressure — which is what the best plots are. Cross pollination is where original voices come from; pure immersion in your own field just produces very competent imitations of what's already been done.

There's a second layer to this, and it's less comfortable: learning includes destroying your own bad ideas. Munger put it bluntly — if you can get good at tearing down your own wrong thinking, that's a gift. Artists resist this instinctively because our work feels like an extension of self, and criticizing the work can feel like criticizing the self. But the ones who last learn to separate the two. I look at each of my works as an experiment. The painting or drawing is not you. It's an experiment you ran. Some experiments fail. Man have I had plenty of bellyflops! A wiser artist at the end of the year is one who kept a stack of "here's what didn't work and why" right next to the finished pieces. But still beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I have been begged to allow the purchase of some of those flops. Yes, I accept credit cards. There will be no starving artist drama here.

Practically, that might mean:

• Keeping a working notebook where you write down why a piece failed, not just that it did, and a solution or resolution. Painters often learn by their mistakes, that turn out to be discoveries to in fact be repeated again. Like not using black paint but layers of blues, reds, and purples. Thus fooling the eye. That's fun. How do you paint a black dog or cat? Easy. Don't use black paint.
• Deliberately showing unfinished or rejected work to one trusted, honest peer — not for reassurance, but for information.
• In my book, The Big Picture, I share some exercises to do. One of them is called "twenty times perfect." You guessed it. It's drawing or painting the same subject twenty times. I know you are rolling your eyes. But hey it works!
• Setting aside real time, not leftover time, for input: gallery visits, unrelated reading, conversations with people outside the art world entirely. Now, if you are going to a gallery, be sure to make an appointment! These folks 1, have business to run and 2, may not do free consultations. Speaking from experience, nothing is worse than the artist equipped with a cell phone portfolio barging in to declare Aunt Betty's genius. You know who just discovered a glue gun and sequins. Do your homework. Read up art success stories. Besides my book, some of my favorite business reads you can apply to art are: Atomic Habits by James Clear and Oversubscribed by Daniel Priestly and Making It In The Art World by Brainard Carey. You will for sure get ideas for your art business. That's right you're in business.

None of this is a guarantee. But it compounds. A career is thousands of small decisions about what to look at, what to try, what to abandon. An artist who's quietly getting wiser every year is playing a completely different game than one who's just repeating their first good idea. The advantage isn't dramatic in any single month. It's dramatic over time.